Folks born after the era of atmospheric nuclear testing,
and acquainted with it only through accounts written
decades later, are prone to react with bafflement—“What
were they thinking?” This comprehensive, meticulously
researched, and thoroughly documented account of the epoch not only describes
what happened and what the consequences were for those in the
path of fallout, but also places events in the social, political,
military, and even popular culture context of that very different
age. A common perception about the period is “nobody
really understood the risks”. Well, it's quite a bit more
complicated than that, as you'll understand after reading this
exposition. As early as 1953, when ranchers near Cedar City,
Utah lost more than 4000 sheep and lambs after they grazed on
grass contaminated by fallout, investigators discovered the
consequences of ingestion of Iodine-131, which is concentrated
by the body in the thyroid gland, where it can not only lead to
thyroid cancer but faster-developing metabolic diseases. The
AEC reacted immediately to this discovery. Commissioner Eugene
Zuckert observed that “In the present frame of mind of the
public, it would only take a single illogical and unforeseeable
incident to preclude holding any future tests in the United
States”, and hence the author of the report on the incident was
ordered to revise the document, “eliminating any reference
to radiation damage or effects”. In a subsequent meetings
with the farmers, the AEC denied any connection between fallout
and the death of the sheep and denied compensation, claiming
that the sheep, including grotesquely malformed lambs born to
irradiated ewes, had died of “malnutrition”.

It was obvious to others that something serious was happening.
Shortly after bomb tests began in Nevada, the Eastman Kodak plant
in Rochester, New York which manufactured X-ray film discovered
that when a fallout cloud was passing overhead their film batches
would be ruined by pinhole fogging due to fallout radiation, and
that they could not even package the film in cardboard supplied
by a mill whose air and water supplies were contaminated by
fallout. Since it was already known that radiologists with
occupational exposure to X-rays had mean lifespans several years shorter
than the general public, it was pretty obvious that exposing much of
the population of a continent (and to a lesser extent the entire
world) to a radiation dose which could ruin X-ray film had to be
problematic at best and recklessly negligent at worst. And yet the
tests continued, both in Nevada and the Pacific, until the Limited
Test Ban Treaty between the U.S., USSR, and Great Britain was
adopted in 1963. France and China, not signatories
to the treaty, continued atmospheric tests until 1971 and 1980
respectively.

What were they thinking? Well, this was a world
in which the memory of a cataclysmic war which had killed
tens of millions of people was fresh, which appeared to
be on the brink of an even more
catastrophic conflict, which might be triggered if the
adversary developed a weapon believed to permit a decisive
preemptive attack or victory through intimidation. In such
an environment where everything might be lost through weakness
and dilatory progress in weapons research, the prospect of
an elevated rate of disease among the general population was
weighed against the possibility of tens of millions of deaths
in a general conflict and the decision was made to pursue the
testing. This may very well have been the correct
decision—since you can't test a counterfactual, we'll
never know—but there wasn't a general war between
the East and West, and to this date no nuclear weapon has been
used in war since 1945. But what is shocking and reprehensible
is that the élites who made this difficult judgement call
did not have the courage to share the facts with the constituents
and taxpayers who paid their salaries and bought the bombs that
irradiated their children's thyroids with Iodine-131 and
bones with Strontium-90. (I'm a boomer. If you want to
know just how many big boom clouds a boomer lived through
as a kid, hold a sensitive radiation meter up to one of
the long bones of the leg; you'll see the elevated beta
radiation from the Strontium-90 ingested in milk and immured
in the bones [Strontium is a chemical analogue of Calcium].)
Instead, they denied the obvious effects, suppressed research
which showed the potential risks, intimidated investigators
exploring the effects of low level radiation, and covered up
assessments of fallout intensity and effects upon those exposed.
Thank goodness such travesties of science and public policy
could not happen in our enlightened age! An excellent example
of mid-fifties AEC propaganda is the
Atomic
Test Effects in the Nevada Test Site Region
pamphlet, available on this site:
“Your best action is not to be worried
about fall-out. … We can expect many
reports that ‘Geiger counters were going
crazy here today.’ Reports like this may
worry people unnecessarily. Don't let them bother you.”

This book describes U.S. nuclear testing in Nevada in detail,
even giving the precise path the fallout cloud from most
detonations took over the country. Pacific detonations are
covered in less detail, concentrating on major events and
fallout disasters such as
Castle Bravo.
Soviet tests and the
Chelyabinsk-40
disaster are covered more sketchily (fair enough—most details
remained secret when the book was written), and British, French, and
Chinese atmospheric tests are mentioned only in passing.

The paperback edition of this book has the hefty cover price of
US$39.95, which is ta lot for a book of 548 pages with just a few
black and white illustrations. I read the Kindle edition, which
is priced at US$11.99 at this writing, which is, on its merits,
even more overpriced. It is a sad, sorry, and shoddy piece of
work, which appears to be the result of scanning a printed
edition of the book with an optical character recognition
program and transferring it to Kindle format without any
proofreading whatsoever. Numbers and punctuation are uniformly
garbled, words are mis-recognised, random words are jammed into
the text as huge raster images, page numbers and chapter
headings are interleaved into the text, and hyphenated words are
not joined while pairs of unrelated words are run together. The
abundant end note citations are randomly garbled and not linked
to the notes at the end of the book. The index is just a scan
of that in the printed book, garbled, unlinked to the text, and
utterly useless. Most public domain Kindle books sold for a
dollar have much better production values than this full price
edition. It is a shame that such an excellent work on which the
author invested such a great amount of work doing the research
and telling the story has been betrayed by this slapdash Kindle
edition which will leave unwary purchasers feeling their pockets
have been picked. I applaud Amazon's providing a way for niche
publishers and independent authors to bring their works to market
on the Kindle, but I wonder if their lack of quality control on
the works published (especially at what passes for full price on
the Kindle) might, in the end, injure the reputation of Kindle books
among the customer base. After this experience, I know for sure that
I will never again purchase a Kindle book from a minor publisher
before checking the comments to see if the transfer merits the
asking price. Amazon might also consider providing a feedback
mechanism for Kindle purchasers to rate the quality of the transfer
to the Kindle, which would appear along with the content-based
rating of the work.

Michael Walsh is a versatile and successful writer who
has been a Moscow correspondent and music critic for
Time magazine, written a novel which is a
sequel to Casablanca, four books about
classical music, and a screenplay for the Disney Channel
which was the highest rated original movie on the channel
at the time. Two of his books have been New York Times
bestsellers, and his gangster novel
And All the Saints
won an American Book Award in 2004. This novel is the
first of a projected series of five. The second,
Early Warning,
was released in September 2010.

In the present novel, the author turns to the genre of the
contemporary thriller, adopting the template created by
Tom Clancy,
and used with such success by authors such as
Vince Flynn
and
Brad Thor:
a loner, conflicted agent working for a shadowy organisation, sent to
do the dirty work on behalf of the highest levels of the government
of the United States. In this case, the protagonist is known only as
“Devlin” (although he assumes a new alias and persona
every few chapters), whose parents were killed in a terrorist attack
at the Rome airport in 1985 and has been raised as a covert instrument
of national policy by a military man who has risen to become the head
of the
National
Security Agency (NSA).
Devlin works for the
Central Security
Service, a branch of the NSA which, in the novel, retains its original
intent of being “Branch 4” of the armed forces, able to exploit
information resources and execute covert operations outside the scope
of conventional military actions.

The book begins with a gripping description of a
Beslan-like
school hostage attack in the United States in which Devlin is activated
to take down the perpetrators. After achieving a mostly successful
resolution, he begins to suspect that the entire event was simply a
ruse to draw him into the open so that he could be taken down by his
enemies. This supposition is confirmed, at least in his own justifiably
paranoid mind, by further terrorist strikes in Los Angeles and London,
which raise the stakes and further expose his identity and connections.

This is a story which starts strong but then sputters out as it
unfolds. The original taut narrative of the school hostage crisis
turns into a mush with a shadowy supervillain who is kind of an
evil George Soros (well, I mean an even more evil George Soros),
a feckless and inexperienced U.S. president (well, at least that
could never happen!), and Devlin, the über paranoid loner suddenly
betting everything on a chick he last met in a shoot-out in Paris.

Thrillers are supposed to thrill, but if set in the contemporary world
or the near future (as is this book—the fall of Mugabe in Zimbabwe
is mentioned, but everything is pretty much the same as the present), they're
expected to be plausible as regards the technology used and
the behaviour of the characters. It just doesn't do to have the hero, in
a moment of crisis, when attacked by ten thousand AK-47 wielding fanatics
from all directions, pull out his ATOMIC SPACE GUN and mow them down
with a single burst.

But that's pretty much what happens here. I'll have to go behind the
spoiler curtain to get into the details, so I'll either see you there
or on the other side if you've decided to approach this novel
freshly without my nattering over details.

We are asked to believe that a sitting U.S. president
would order two members of his Secret Service detail
to commit a cold blooded murder in order to frame a
senator and manipulate his reelection campaign, and
that the agents would carry out the murder.
This is simply absurd.

As the story develops we learn that the shadowy
“Branch 4” for which Devlin believes he
is working does not, in fact, exist, and that Devlin
is its sole agent, run by the director of NSA. Now
Devlin has back-door access to all U.S. intelligence
assets and databases and uses them throughout. How
plausible is it that he wouldn't have figured this out
himself?

Some people have cell phones: Devlin has a Hell phone.
In chapter 7 we're treated to a description of Devlin's
Black Telephone, which is equipped with “advanced
voice-recognition software”, a fingerprint scanner
in the receiver, and a retinal scanner in the handset.
“If any of these elements were not sequenced within
five seconds, the phone would self-destruct in a fireball
of shrapnel, killing any unauthorized person unlucky
enough to have picked it up.” Would you
trust a government-supplied telephone bomb to work
with 100% reliability? What if your stack of dossiers
topples over and knocks off the receiver?

In several places “logarithm” is used where
“algorithm” is intended. Gadgetry is rife
with urban legends such as the computer virus which
causes a hard drive to melt.

In chapter 12 the phone rings and Devlin “spoke
into a Blu-Ray mouthpiece as he answered”.
Blu-ray
is an optical disc storage format;
Bluetooth
is the wireless peripheral technology. Besides, would an
operative obsessed with security to the level of paranoia
use a wireless headset with dubious anti-eavesdropping
measures?

The coup de grace of the
series of terrorist attacks is supposed to be an
electromagnetic
pulse (EMP) attack against the United States, planned
to knock out all electronics, communications, and electrical
power in the eastern part of the country. The attack
consists of detonating an ex-Soviet nuclear weapon raised
to the upper atmosphere by a weather balloon launched from
a ship off the East Coast. Where to begin? Well, first of all,
at the maximum altitude reachable by a weather balloon, the
mean free path of the gamma rays from the detonation through
the atmosphere would be limited, as opposed to the unlimited
propagation distance from an explosion in space well above the
atmosphere. This would mean that any ionisation of atoms in
the atmosphere would be a local phenomenon, which would reduce
the intensity and scope of the generated pulse. Further,
the electromagnetic pulse cannot propagate past the horizon,
so even if a powerful pulse were generated at the altitude of
a balloon, it wouldn't propagate far enough to cause a disaster
all along the East Coast.

In the assault on Clairvaux Prison, is it conceivable that
an experienced special forces operator would take the
mother of a hostage and her young son along aboard the
helicopter gunship leading the strike?

After the fight in the prison, archvillain Skorenzy
drops through a trap door and escapes to a bolt-hole,
and at the end of the novel is still at large and presumed
to be continuing his evil schemes. But his lair is inside
a French maximum security prison! How does he get away?
Say what you like about the French military, when it comes
to terrorists they're deadly serious, right up there with
the Mossad. Would a prison that housed Carlos the Jackal
have a tunnel which would allow Skorenzy to saunter out?
Would French officials allow the man who blew up a part of
Los Angeles and brought down the
London Eye
with a cruise missile free passage?

It's a tangled, muddled mess. It has its moments, but there isn't
the building toward a climax and then the resolution one expects
from a thriller. None of the characters are really admirable, and
the author's policy preferences (with which I largely agree) are
exhibited far too blatantly, as opposed to being woven into the
plot. The author, accomplished in other genres, may eventually
master the thriller, but I doubt I'll read any of the sequels to find
out for myself.